Theaster Gates: 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (dOCUMENTA) by Michael Darling (2012-10-31)

12 Ballads for Huguenot House records a project by Theaster Gates that linked two abandoned buildings, one in Chicago and one in Kassel, by moving materials from each into the other.

Huguenot House in Kassel dates from the early nineteenth century. Migrant workers built it, as they built many houses in Gates’s own Chicago neighbourhood, and it had fallen into disrepair. Gates arranged a trade of fabric: material from a derelict Chicago building went to Kassel to renovate the house, and material stripped out of the Kassel house went into rebuilding the Chicago one. The book has a foreword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Madeleine Grynsztejn, texts by Michael Darling, Gates, Matthew Jesse Jackson and John Preus, and a conversation between Gates and Christov-Bakargiev. Walther König published it in 2012 as a clothbound hardcover of 128 pages.

Gates (born 1973) trained in urban planning and is a professor at the University of Chicago. He showed the Huguenot House work at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, and he received the Nasher Sculpture Prize in 2018.